Cold Mountain
Charles Frazier, 1997
★ 3.89 from 253.1k ratings on Goodreads
A wounded Confederate soldier walks home across the Blue Ridge while a woman learns to farm alone: a slow, sensuous novel about survival, attention, and the long road back. A slow, lyrical walk through mountain country and wartime memory, with close attention to land, hunger, and the pull of home.
Feels like longing, wonder and dread. About home, war and society.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy patient, landscape-rich fiction and a journey-home story told in quiet, poetic prose. Be aware that some readers find it slow and over-descriptive, and its length can test your engagement.
Why read it
Read it for the landscape writing and the quiet weight of survival, and for a homecoming story that asks what attention can hold.
A page from the book
The rules a prisoner invents to make a window interesting.
That summer, Inman had viewed the world as if it were a picture framed by the molding around the window. Long stretches of time often passed when, for all the change in the scene, it might as well have been an old painting of a road, a wall, a tree, a cart, a blind man. Inman had sometimes counted off slow numbers in his head to see how long it would be before anything of significance altered. It was a game and he had rules for it. A bird flying by did not count. Someone walking down the road did. Major weather changes did-the sun coming out, fresh rain-but shadows of passing clouds did not. Some days he’d get up in the thousands before there was any allowable alteration in the elements of the picture. What readers say
Readers are divided: some find the novel beautiful, poetic, and moving, especially its landscape writing and journey-home story; others find it slow, overlong, and too descriptive, with some struggling to stay engaged.
Charles Frazier.Frazier was born in Asheville, North Carolina; the novel grew from a family story about his great-great-grandfather, who deserted the Confederate army and walked home.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Cold Mountain for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy patient, landscape-rich fiction and a journey-home story told in quiet, poetic prose. Be aware that some readers find it slow and over-descriptive, and its length can test your engagement.
- What is Cold Mountain like?
- A slow, lyrical walk through mountain country and wartime memory, with close attention to land, hunger, and the pull of home. Feels like longing, wonder and dread. About home, war and society.
- What should I read after Cold Mountain?
- If you liked Cold Mountain, try The Shelters of Stone (Jean M. Auel), This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal El-Mohtar) and Far from the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy).
A taste of the feed
Somewhere, someone was the first to touch a wild animal on purpose.
People knew animals. All the people they had met on their Journey hunted them, and most honored or paid homage to them or their spirits in one way or another. Animals had been observed carefully for as long as anyone could remember. People knew the environments they favored and the foods they liked, their migration patterns and seasonal movements, their birthing periods and rutting schedules. But no one had ever tried to touch a living, breathing animal in a friendly way. No one had ever tried to tie a rope around the head of any animal and lead it around. No one had ever tried to tame an animal, or even imagined that it could be done.
The Shelters of Stone · Jean M. Auel
What do you bring someone who has all of time?
I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.
This Is How You Lose the Time War · Amal El-Mohtar
What happens to a woman who has never needed anyone, the first time she does.
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.
Far from the Madding Crowd · Thomas Hardy
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